First paragraph:
On 17 April 2009 the Peruvian daily newspaper El Correo
published on its front page a picture of congressional
representative Hilaria Supa Huama´n from Cuzco, the
first elected politician to take the oath of office in her
native language of Quechua in 2006. The front-page picture,
however, was not meant to highlight Supa's Quechua-speaking
roots or her traditional indigenous clothing. Instead, the
picture directed attention to the grammatical and
orthographical mistakes contained in the hand-written notes
the selfeducated Supa had taken in Spanish. In an editorial
Aldo Maria´tegui, the director of the newspaper,
criticized the illiteracy and lack of legislative
professionalism of elected representatives like Supa.
Congressional representatives across party lines, several
media outlets and other professional organizations quickly
denounced the overt racial overtones of the newspaper and
its director, who, ironically, is the grandson of Jose´
Carlos Maria´tegui, a well-known indigenous rights
advocate

Figures and
Tables:

Table 1. Indigenous and Mestizo party preferences in
three elections.

Table 2. Estimates of party preferences for
Peru´ Posible (Toledo's Party in 2001).

Figure 1. Indigenous and Mestizo party
preferences.

Figure 3. Differences in support between PNP and
UPP

Last Paragraph:
These findings suggest that the missing element to the
formation of an indigenous cleavage in Peruvian politics has
been the absence of political identities, which were not
created until 2001 with the campaign of Alejandro Toledo. As
the results of this study confirm, the findings of previous
research demonstrating the importance of political actors to
the formation of political identities cross-nationally
(Bartolini and Mair, 1990; Enyedi, 2005; Evans, 2000:
410-11; Evans et al., 1999; Torcal and Mainwaring, 2003),
the actions of parties in creating these political
identities appear paramount to explaining the presence or
(apparent) absence of indigenous political representation,
not just in Peru, but in every other case of ethnic
political competition. Future research, therefore, should
lend more weight to explanations of the emergence of
indigenous politics that are based on the emergence of
political identities.